


in a wood where nobody goes

by belatrix



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Incest, Infidelity, POV Daenerys, non-linear, side pairing: Jon Snow/Daenerys Targaryen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-10
Updated: 2018-07-10
Packaged: 2019-06-08 11:38:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,129
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15242553
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/belatrix/pseuds/belatrix
Summary: “Sansa is―” Jon had said, the very first time they went out together, his eyes glinting from the bottle of wine already finished on their table. He’d faltered on the last letter of his sister’s name, all sharp syllables that ended on a sigh. “Sansa’s all I have left.”





	in a wood where nobody goes

**Author's Note:**

> *edit*
> 
> Guys what the hell happened in the comment section. I untagged Jon/Dany, I genuinely didn't know it would upset some people _so_ much that one of the pairings was included in the relationship tags. 
> 
> If you're an exclusive Jon/Dany shipper you might not want to read this, it has Jon/Sansa. Likewise, if you're an exclusive Jon/Sansa shipper you might not want to read this, it heavily features Jon/Dany and is told from Dany's POV. 
> 
> ...please don't fight, guys. Fanfiction is fun.

 

 

 

“Will you forgive me?” he says. His eyes are dark and tired and earnest and she wants to hate him, if only for a single moment, because it would make things simple. She hates how hard he is to hate.

But he’s just standing there, arms hanging listlessly at his sides, and it feels as though he’s thrown his heart out onto the carpet on the living room floor ―not at her feet, never there, but she’s never wanted that of him.

(It’s not _her_ forgiveness he’s truly begging for, but he wants forgiveness all the same.)

“Will you forgive me?” he says. Dany considers.

 

 

 

This is how it happens:

she walks into the room because she _heard_ them ―she can’t not walk into the room.

There is a sharp inhale (him) and a pale hand freezing where it’s twisted around a leather belt (her) and two pairs of eyes, different and yet the same in their surprise, their guilt, their linked, shared exhaustion with the world.

The low, faltering light from the bedside lamp is casting them in shadow.

She stares at them staring at her and she’s waiting for something that won’t come. There should be a burst of fury coiling around her spine like a flame. She should be raging. Instead there’s only an odd sort of numbness that feels almost like relief.

She was right about this, then. It’s a lonely thought.

 

 

 

Jon Snow is unexpected.

Dany has used a lot of words to describe him, most of them woven together in the privacy of her own mind ―he’s good-hearted, yes, and he’s brave, and he’s stubborn and passionate and a whirlwind of emotions high and low, tucked carefully away underneath a façade of quiet coldness. He is complicated in the simplicity of his heart. There is an immovable, genuine kindness in him that she’d managed to convince herself she didn’t want in a man.

(But as it seems, she does. Want it.

This scared her, in the beginning, the barely-formed dreams of the girl ―child― she once was, allowed to resurface once again. A gentle boy with gentle hands and a beautiful home, a home, a _home_.)

And above all, he is this, _unexpected_ , a single sweet thing in a world where sweetness was really only veiled rot. She thinks she might not fall in love with him, but that doesn’t mean she cannot love him.

He gives her smiles and flowers, kisses the back of her hand and opens doors for her and he means it, all of it, his chivalry an honest, only slightly awkward thing. He holds her hand in public and wraps his arm around her when she leans close, and his kisses remind her of something as soft and secret as adolescent love.

The feeling of his body as it moves above hers ―that is sweet, too, and if it’s not quite home, she can tilt her head a little to the left, gaze up at him in a fading light just _so_ , she might just let herself pretend.

 

 

 

In retrospect ―it’s easier to ponder things in retrospect― she thinks this might have been it:

“Have you told your sister about us?” she asks him, her hand curving around his neck.

His fingers halt on the first button of her blouse. There’s a single moment, the space of a sharp exhale, where he doesn’t look at her.

“No,” he says, and it’s a rough thing, quiet with en edge she can’t quite name, “not yet.”

And there’s _something_ in the way he pauses, in that fractured second before his eyes find hers again, that has her pushing him away and scrambling out of bed, a flurry of limbs and hair. She does this, sometimes; her heart races further ahead than her head.

“Are you keeping me a secret, then?” she says, an off tilt rising in her voice, sudden as a snowfall in a long summer.

Jon barely blinks. He never falters at her mood swings; he is calm and concerned and patient and it makes something kick softly inside her chest. _I’m sorry_ , she almost says, doesn’t.

“No,” he says again, looks down, and she sees that his hand is clutching at the sheets. She wonders if he knows he’s doing it. “I’ll tell her, Dany. Tomorrow.”

She holds still, there in the middle of her room, watches him on her bed, as if waiting for something grand and terrible and sentimental to happen. (Nothing does.)

 

 

 

The thing is―

there are rumors, because there are always rumors. One can’t grow up in the house of a family with a last name that goes back centuries, old money and old blood and old pride, and not be shrouded in town gossip, secret whispers behind hands and fingers pointed like blades, like a wound.

Jon might have lived in the darkened margin of such a household for far longer than he hasn’t, and Dany might have been raised in a different continent altogether, but they both know this as surely they know their names.

People talk.

 

 

 

“Sansa is―” Jon had said, the very first time they went out together, his eyes glinting from the bottle of wine already finished on their table. He’d faltered on the last letter of his sister’s name, all sharp syllables that ended on a sigh. “Sansa’s all I have left.”

Dany had simply looked back at him, that pale face illuminated strangely in the bar’s low light, had nodded her head. She understands family as well as she understands the yearning for love, for home, for control of a scattered life.

She _understands_. But―

He’s doing the dishes when she tells him first. Jon is always helping where he can, even now that his family’s old housekeepers have become his. His, and his sister’s.

“People talk,” Dany says, hands clasped too tightly around her coffee mug. It’s burning, but she doesn’t mind.

Jon’s shoulders stiffen for half a heartbeat; he wipes his soapy hands and doesn’t turn around. “About what?” he asks quietly.

She surveys the tight line of his back for a long time. “You don’t know, Jon Snow?”

She meant it to be a bitter, angry thing. Instead, she just sounds defeated.

 

 

 

There is a morning when Dany wakes up on twisted sheets, Jon sleeping beside her, and she sits there watching him.

The rise and fall of his bare chest, the scars he won’t talk about, and his arm stretched away from her in sleep, curved around nothing on the mattress, as though shaped in the form of a ghost between them, an absent girl there on the bed. Invisible, but present, unshakeable.

The sun glares through the blinds. She leaves without waking him.

 

 

 

Jon takes her home to meet his sister in the middle of winter, and she tries not to think of it too much lest she finds unwanted symbolism there. It might make for a worrisome train of thought.

Sansa has a demeanor that is all quiet dignity and polite coolness, which Dany has slowly come to understand must be a long-standing Stark family trait. There are formal greetings, naturally; Sansa’s words are measured, as precise and calculated as a dagger poised to cut, but not as cruel.

Dany can tell this much about this girl, Sansa, that she might have sharpened herself into a weapon, but she can’t bring herself to be truly cruel. No matter that maybe, just maybe, she sometimes wishes she could be.

(Dany knows ―she’s seen this in her own mirror, after all.)

Their heels click similarly on the polished floors as they move to the dining room, and Jon walks silently behind them, staring resolutely ahead, his fingers closing around nothing. At the table, Jon and Sansa sit carefully apart, a measured space between their elbows, a border made of tall glasses and silverware keeping them at a respectable distance from each other.

It turns out that Sansa is skilled at conversation; her voice never quite warms over but she engages Dany without any real coldness, inventive and seamless in her choice of topics, interested in Dany’s answers and opinions. They talk about innocent, inoffensive things while Jon pretends to eat, dark eyes darting, fleetingly, from one face to the other.

“Would you help me with dessert, Daenerys?” Sansa says with a careful smile, and Jon brings his glass to his mouth, silent and tense, as Dany pushes back her chair.

And―

“My brother seems very happy with you,” Sansa says once they’re alone in the kitchen, and there’s something soft and worn and weary in her words.

(And that’s the moment, suspended and hanging by a secret thread, when Dany realizes this:

where the undeniable, aching similarity between Jon and Sansa stems from, this familiarity of movement that draws them together and keeps them tightly linked, bound by something deeper than old blood. It’s the set of their eyes; the lilt of their voices. The exact same kind of tiredness seeps through both. The kind that maybe only they can understand in each other.)

Dany smiles a small, practiced smile of her own, and helps Sansa cut the cake into three identical porcelain plates. _No, he doesn’t_ , she won’t say.

 

 

 

She was a girl, once. She’s not too old to not remember.

 _Love shouldn’t be this hard_ , she had thought then, when her life had been a different country and a different, harsher man.

Love shouldn’t be this hard. A childish cry against the world, and she knows this doesn’t apply to her alone.

(She’s not that selfish. Things might have been far less complicated if she was.)

 

 

 

Dany knows these things, in order:

There is a hollow space carved out inside her chest where she could pour in anything she wished. Hope, hatred, cruelty, madness, greatness. She used to want to fill it with love, but that was a lifetime ago. Such sentiment is, it seems, for other people.

There is truth in a man’s eyes, if you know just how to look into them. Men have fallen in love with her almost all her life, but a man loving you doesn’t mean he’ll be honest with you, too. The examples are numerous.

There is a vase sitting on her vanity where she puts all the flowers Jon brings her. She keeps them there until they wilt, petals scattered everywhere, blackened at the edges.

There is the way Jon looks at her, and there is a certain amount of affection there, yes, and sometimes lust and sometimes even awe, but there’s something else he can’t hide. He is not a liar.

There is the way Jon adores Sansa to the point it presses around his soul, silently, secretly, but painted in sharp lines across his face, visible in the right light. Dany knew from the beginning, just like everyone did, that they were nearly frighteningly co-dependent; they never bothered to hide it. But while Sansa seems to love her brother with a distant watchfulness, something like a girl’s melancholy, Jon loves his sister with the kind of fractured guilt that leaves Dany wondering if maybe the whispered rumors about them are true, after all.

There is romance, and there is heart, and there is family, and there is love. Those things are separate. Those things are not separate.

 

 

 

“Do you love him?” Sansa asks, and she doesn’t sound jealous. She doesn’t sound cold. She doesn’t sound like anything. There’s a glass of amber liquor in her hand that she will not drink, but there’s still the smudge of her pale lipstick, pressed to the rim. For a second, only a single second, Dany imagines Jon taking it from her hand, pressing his mouth where Sansa’s had been.

She doesn’t know how it makes her feel, and she doesn’t know what to say, so she shrugs, a fluid, practiced motion, a shoulder rising and falling indolently. “Do you?” she asks, and it’s not harsh when she says it, either.

Sansa blinks, sets her glass down quietly, carefully. “He’s all I have left.”

A memory: Jon leaving their bed at the sound of his phone ringing in the middle of the night, his frantic movements as he searched around the room, the panic that flashed across his face when he saw Sansa’s name on the screen. _Is everything alright_ , he had said, harsh and choked with a myriad of emotions, his knuckles gone white around the phone. _Sansa, are you alright_.

“I know,” Dany says, breathes out, and picks up the glass to drink.

 

 

 

“Will you forgive me?” he says. His eyes are dark and tired and earnest and she’s tired too, now, doesn’t know if she has the strength for this.

 _No_ , she thinks.

(She still cannot hate him.)

“Yes,” she says.

 

 

 


End file.
